“All the auto makers are looking for suppliers in Mexico,” Eduardo Solís Sánchez, executive president of the country’s auto industry association Amia (Asociación Mexicana de la Industria Automotriz AC), told a major plastics industry conference in late September.

“They don’t necessarily want to import components and parts,” he said at the annual, two-day convention of Mexico’s plastics industry association, Anipac (Asociación Nacional de Industrias del Plástico AC), adding that the best opportunities are for Tier 1 suppliers.

At the same event, Rina Quijada, chief executive of IntelliChem Inc. of Houston, which provides intelligence for the petrochemical and plastics industries in Latin America, said the average content of plastics and compounds in light vehicles increased from a few pounds in 1960 to 375 pounds in 2010. By 2015 they will account for 10 percent (397 pounds) of a car’s average weight of 3,970 pounds, she said.

Thomas Karig, vice president of corporate relations and strategy of Volkswagen AG’s Mexico operations, who was not at the conference, told Plastics News exclusively by email that “it’s safe to say that polymer consumption for VW Group production in NA (VW Puebla, Chattanooga and Audi) might increase by approximately 30 percent until 2018, compared to 2011.”

A major concern aired by some of the 70 or so delegates and speakers is the shortage of specialist machine operators and mold makers in Mexico.

“Our problem is a lack of qualified staff,” said Sergio Beutelspacher Sandoval, Mexico’s prolific inventor of more than 1,000 individually designed extrusion and blow molding machines, several hundred of which have been exported across the Americas and to China.

His 35-year-old company, Beutelspacher SA de CV, of Mexico City, which employs 100, has grown 10 percent this year and Beutelspacher wants the expansion to continue. “But it’s difficult because the whole culture of toolmaking and other trades is being lost,” he told Plastics News.

Solís agreed. “We have a problem with [a shortage of] toolmakers.” Amia, he said, “is working with the suppliers association Ina [Industria Nacional de Autopartes AC] to try to rectify the situation.”

Francisco Antón Gabelich, managing director of Mexico’s government-run advanced technology center Ciateq (Centro de Tecnología Avanzada AC), a speaker at the congress, admitted to PN afterward that the organization does not offer mold-making courses at its half a dozen branches, either at graduate or post graduate level.

“This has to come from the technological colleges,” he said, adding, however, that multinational supplier Magna International Inc.’s technical college in the Mexican city of Puebla trains would-be toolmakers, 20 of whom have been employed in Germany in recent years.

During his hour-long presentation Solís said Mexico’s auto industry is the eighth largest in the world and the fourth-largest exporter of light vehicles. It assembled 2.55 million units in 2011 and is on course to produce 2.7 million this year (up 5.5 percent), 2.3 million or 85 percent of which will be exported, 64 percent of them to the United States. The likely production total in 2013 is 3 million, he said.

Lorenza Martínez Trigueros, Mexico’s deputy economy under minister, who inaugurated the event, said in March that Mexico will probably have an installed light vehicle assembly capacity of 4 million by 2017.

“We [the light vehicle makers] accounted for 19.8 percent of Mexico’s manufacturing gross national product in 2011 and generated $32.05 billion in foreign currency,” Solís added, pointing out that the sector “represents 4 percent of the [national] market for plastics.”

He stated that “more than 80 percent of the biggest auto industry suppliers in the world” have manufacturing operations in Mexico. Oscar Albín, Ina’s president, told PN in June that supplies, including those made of plastics, manufactured in Mexico for the global automotive industry totaled $65.03 billion in 2011, 13 percent more than the $57.54 billion produced in 2010.

According to Solís, Mexico is the United States’ largest supplier of auto parts, shipping $35.8 billion worth out of a total of $113.8 billion in 2011, while Quijada said auto parts are key in the process of developing the Mexican automotive industry.

“In Mexico,” she said, “the resins necessary to manufacture auto parts are in their infancy. There’s a growth opportunity for both the [resin] suppliers and processors working together.”

Apart from its “privileged geographical location,” three dozen free trade agreements and the expertise of its work force, Mexico has attracted investments from the largest vehicle makers and suppliers because it has economic and political stability, Solís said.

“The announcements by car makers of multibillion-dollar investments in Mexico in the past year were made while the country was in the middle of a pre-presidential election campaign, which speaks highly of our country,” he added.

Mercedes-Benz, a division of Daimler AG, BMW AG and Toyota will probably build assembly facilities in Mexico also. According to a source mentioned in an article published by Automotive News in August, Mercedes-Benz and Toyota are considering Aguascalientes, while BMW prefers Querétaro.

Asked about reports in the Mexican media that Tata Motors, a division of India’s Tata Group, is also looking at the possibility of building an assembly plant in the country, Solís said: “I’ve been hearing about this for almost two years. I know some Mexicans are really involved.” Tata owns the Jaguar and Land Rover brands, among others.

An example of expansion projects by vehicle makers already operating in Mexico came in March. Dirk Grosse-Loheide, Volkswagen’s executive purchasing vice president for North America, said the German auto maker could produce up to 615,000 vehicles in Puebla in 2012, which would be a 20.5 percent increase on the 510,000 units it assembled there in 2011. Nissan is also preparing to build more than one million light vehicles a year in Mexico in the short term, it said in January, the same month it announced plans to build its third assembly plant in Mexico.

Solís said the importation of 6.6 million used vehicles from the United States in the past six years has damaged Mexico’s domestic market for new light vehicles, predicted to be 990,000 units this year, the same as 10 years ago.

“If we could sort out the internal market, we could build three new assembly plants,” he said.

This report is a review and analysis of the North American Plastics Recycling Industry, including key trends and statistics based on 2013 performance. We examine market environment factors, regulatory issues, industry challenges, key drivers and emerging trends in post-consumer and post-industrial recycling.

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